Dear Friend 🟣✨🟡, Today, I would like us to explore the name The Art of Freedom, discuss its meaning and tell you who exactly is 🟣 xōē 🟡. What Makes Art? Most of us walk, talk and write our way through life, but few of us would call our steps a dance, our speech a song or our words poetry. What is it that turns steps from walking to dancing? That turns speech from talking to singing? That turns words from writing to poetry? Among many considerations, we generally walk to get somewhere. In dancing, there is no question of getting anywhere. On the contrary, we might want to elongate and articulate each step. Our bodies become a means for expressing how the music moves through us. Each gesture and step expresses what is happening within our being as we experience the music. Each step is a graceful brushstroke on a canvas of time, step after step, we make up for the whole time painting called the dance. We do not take each step to cause a dance, we take each step for the sheer delight of the movement itself. And yet, by the end of the song; a dance has been performed nonetheless. Not as a caused calculated result, but as an emergent expression of our meaning. In a dance we may become sensitive to subtle, nuanced, refined and often elusive inner revelations that we express into tangible forms with our bodies. Those forms can be experienced by others. However, even if the dance has a tangible form, it points us beyond, to the stirrings of our soul. It becomes the bridge by which the inner revelations of another start reverberating in our own being. Herein lies the appreciation of art, in the movements of our inner being provoked by the art form contemplated. The more sensitive we become to the beauty and truth in those inner revelations, the more we have to express through our technique. The more we master the technique, the more expressive, refined and moving our dancing becomes. We become more capable of expressing ever more refined and nuanced meaning; and within this lies an increasing freedom of expression. A beginner dancer may lack awareness of certain parts of their body, and those parts may not reflect the meaning expressed in the forms and movements of the rest of the body. The body of an advanced dancer, on the other hand, is far more articulate, it embodies fully their inner meaning in all its nuance. Each movement is deliberate and precise; reflecting a coherent inner meaning that is present in each step like a brushstroke and that is gradually revealed through the dance as a complete and unified painting. Creating Inner and Outer Palaces So creating art is a twofold endeavor, we have to equally cultivate: * 🟣 Our technique as the means by which we create and express in the outer world. * 🟡 Our inner life as the muse that allows us to hear and understand the whispers of Life revealing herself to us in all her majesty. Cultivating our art comes from the intertwining dance of these two pillars; technique and meaning. Each time we raise one of the pillars, we create the support to complete the turn of the spiral and raise the other pillar equally, and in turn, the whole structure upwards. Each ascent refining our expression as well as our meaning soaring higher and higher. The technique is what allows us to express our meaning; through it, our inner life takes form in the outer world as our art. Now made visible, we are able to inspect it, live with it, and reflect upon it. In this reflection, we come face to face with both the limitations of our technique and the distortions within our meaning. If we speak pictorially about this, we could say: We can only build magical elegant majestic palaces if we: * first, have it within ourselves to be able to conceive of and design such a palace inwardly. * equally, if we have the technique, to be able to create it as a reality. In our dreams, palaces can materialize themselves out of thin air. We want them, so we dream them. Fortunately, that is not the case in reality. In reality we have to live through a series of logical sequential steps to materialize our palaces. Reality always demands that we honor its logic and the effort appropriate in the achievement our feats. In every art form, there are structures we must respect in order to give form to our meaning. Dreams tend to bypass structure, discard the effort and continuity required by reality. They would have us live in fairytales where anything we desire can be experienced without regard for the cost or the illogical inconsistent nature of realizing them. In building a palace, we must regard the laws of structure. No matter how grand our vision is, if we ignore the distribution of weight in an arch, the structure will collapse. Equally important, without sensitivity to beauty and truth, we might inadvertently build technically impressive prisons rather than palaces. The more majestic and refined our vision, the more respect and mastery we must have over the physical principles that allow it to take form. Freedom of expression in architecture emerges not from defying the laws of reality, but from collaborating with them; mastering them so well that we can make stone come to life. So we let reality shape our dreams. With practice we start having reality as part of the constitution of our inner lives. We learn more and more to respect its structures when trying to impress our meaning upon the world with ever increasing freedom, ease and fluidity. In this relationship between reality and our meaning, our art becomes the meeting point; the tender and warm reunion of two long-lost lovers. So art is about balancing two beautiful equally essential pillars: * Technique and meaning * Outer and Inner * Form and formless * Reality and dreams * Past and Future * Matter and Spirit And I can go on and on, but I am sure you see my point. We often think of art as wild creativity, free of rules. However, it is a strong expansive structure that lets the fire of creativity grow without turning the whole structure into ashes 🔥. What is the use of an intense creative fire if we cannot get ourselves to sit and create our art. Not one time exceptionally, but consistently. Because it is this consistency that allows for the structure to grow which in turn allows for the fire to have the space to grow even bigger. The stronger and the more flexible the structure, the more movement it can contain without collapse. The tallest skyscrapers have to allow for the strongest movements caused by the winds and earthquakes; because without flexibility, even the most solid structures can break under fierce movement. To summarize: Art not only cultivates our sensitivity to make our inner world beautiful, delightful, golden cozy palaces; art also gives us the way to make those palaces an outer reality we live in. How is Freedom an Art? When I first started exploring the nature of freedom, I might have thought it is something along the lines of doing whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want, wherever we want with whoever we want. Essentially, that freedom is completely doing away with any structure and form. After all, structure and form always constrict and limit the possibilities of movement. And if movement is limited, how could there be any freedom? It did not occur to me at that time that structure is what equally allows for any movement at all. I really only started considering the nature of freedom, after having heard of Spiritual Liberation. It sounded like the perfect summary of what I was looking for in life: Freeing individuals from the cycle of suffering bound by time, which is often associated with worldly existence and the illusion of separation from the divine and others. And awakening a direct knowing of the source of existence, not as theory but as living experience. This sounded perfect. Not only as the perfect escape plan from the unbearable delight of existence; but equally as the opportunity to finally fulfill my lifelong dream to peak behind the scenes of existence and have the meaning behind it all revealed. If there is such a thing. Not to spoil the ending of the post, like I wanted to do with my life… it turns out I was confusing the word liberation with another word. Luckily, my naive understanding at that point was enough for me to go all in and not just all in, all out and around. I organized all of my life toward this goal. If it did not contribute to liberation as I understood it, I did not do it. I studied the sacred texts and practiced every day morning and evening for hours a whole lot of austerities and even more superstitions, the details of which I will spare you here. I thought, or more precisely; I bargained: you just have to endure this for a few years and get an eternity of freedom. What a sweet deal 🫱🏽🫲🏻. The freedom I imagined was of course transcendental, beyond and outside this life. Exactly as my conception of freedom was at the moment: a formless existence. I was hoping I could skip the plot, the characters development, their backstories and just have the meaning revealed in a glorious ending scene. It turns out you only get meaning, and liberation for that matter; by sitting through the whole movie. What happened next I can only describe as mercy or grace. I had read that the path to liberation may take as many life times as a tree has leaves. Notice not years, but life times. I thought with extreme dedication and commitment and perhaps a bit of luck I can bargain it down to just one life. So I was naturally ready to spend the rest of my life pursuing this. Luckily, or perhaps due to a divine oversight, the petals of a flower were counted in years instead of the leaves of a tree in life times, and I got what I was seeking. To my surprise (probably not to yours 🤭) it was not a liberation in any real meaning of the word. It was however a seed of understanding and freedom. Taking Flight If I speak symbolically about what
